November 7, 2005

After the release of Visual Studio 2005 today, a natural question is what’s next for Microsoft’s Developer Division. The expected response is Orcas, the next version of Visual Studio due in 2007 or so, but Eric Maino provides a different answer on his weblog:

While I can’t answer this question for everyone I can answer it for my self and most of the developer division (there may be some people going on vacation for a while, so I can’t speak for them). The developer division as a whole is working on MQ.

MQ is a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality. We have learned a lot from the previous 3 versions of Visual Studio that were built around the .NET Framework, the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship.

This milestone while it will not answer everything it gives the division time to analyze its processes and make improvements. Every team (just like a business) has areas that it would like to improve, but hasn’t been able to in the past when there is code churn and deadlines looming.

I really think that MQ is a great step in the right direction and I believe that as a customer you will see this throughout the Orcas product cycle.

One Response to “So what’s next for Visual Studio?”

[...] Now that Visual Studio 2005 has been launched, there has been a good deal of buzz in recent days about what’s next for Visual Studio ([1], [2]). S. “Soma” Somasegar (Microsoft Corporate VP, Developer Division) provides a roadmap in a lengthy post on his weblog. Hit the link for the full details, but to net it out: [...]